Baltimore settled with opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals on the eve of its trial against that company and two distributors of opioids that the city accused of aggressively marketing the drugs and pumping them into pharmacies here.

The terms of the settlement were not outlined in a joint Sunday night filing informing the court of the agreement.

Johnson & Johnson declined to comment on the settlement.

Bryan Doherty, a spokesman for Democratic Mayor Brandon Scott, confirmed in an email that the city settled with Johnson & Johnson.

“The City cannot at this time discuss any of the specific terms of the settlement,” Doherty said. “It is one of the stipulations of the agreement that we cannot discuss specific terms until” the cases against the remaining defendants conclude.

Before the latest settlement, Baltimore had secured $402.5 million from settlements with various opioid companies.

Baltimore’s remaining claims against opioid distributors McKesson and AmerisourceBergen appear slated to proceed to trial this week. Jury selection began Monday and it could take several days for attorneys to find jurors who are able to preside over a trial scheduled to go through November.

In its 2018 lawsuit, Baltimore alleged Johnson & Johnson and other opioid manufacturers and distributors falsely advertised their drugs to downplay their addictiveness, bribed doctors under the guise of speaking engagements and ignored suspiciously large orders for their products.

“These companies aggressively marketed opioids to Baltimore pill mill prescribers, such as the Rosen-Hoffberg prescribers, and disregarded obvious signs of diversion they observed at, in their own words, the ‘chaotic’ offices,’” city attorneys wrote in recent court papers, referring to a pain clinic where one owner was convicted of conspiring to distribute opioids and another of receiving kickbacks from an opioid maker.

“J&J and Janssen,” the city’s lawyers continued, “also bribed Baltimore prescribers by holding speaker programs where J&J and Janssen paid doctors to promote Janssen opioids to other prescribers… J&J and Janssen played games to drive up opioid sales and showed a disregard for the harms they were causing in Baltimore when they joked and laughed about opioid abuse.”

The city added in recent court papers that Johnson & Johnson recognized signs that its opioids were being abused in Baltimore, but saw that as an opportunity to boost sales by advancing a false marketing narrative that its drugs were less addictive than others on the market.

Johnson & Johnson produced two opioid medications cited in the complaint: Duragesic, which was a patch form of fentanyl, and Nucynta.

“Janssen sought to expand the use of Duragesic through, for example, advertisements proclaiming, ‘It’s not just for end stage cancer anymore!’“ attorneys for the city wrote in the complaint. “This claim earned Janssen a warning letter from the (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), for representing that Duragesic was ‘more useful in a broader range of conditions or patients than has been demonstrated by substantial evidence.’”

Johnson & Johnson regularly made more than $1 billion annually in sales of Duragesic up to 2009, the lawsuit said. Sales of Nucynta and the extended release version of that drug, Nucynta ER, brought in $172 million in 2014.

In a statement before it reached a settlement with the city, a spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson and Janssen said the companies “deeply sympathize with those affected by the impact of opioid abuse and addiction” and cited a 2022 settlement with states and municipalities around the country that “brought immediate financial support to address the opioid crisis.”

Baltimore, hard hit by the opioid epidemic, opted out of that settlement to pursue its claim separately.

The Johnson & Johnson spokesperson said Baltimore’s claims have “no basis in the facts or the law” and that evidence would show “Janssen did everything a responsible manufacturer of these important prescription pain medicines should do.”

The city sued Johnson & Johnson and other opioid companies under the state’s public nuisance statute, arguing that the the businesses manufacturing, marketing and distribution of prescription opioids fueled the illicit opioid epidemic driven by heroin and, later, fentanyl use. The defendants’ actions, the city argues, amount to a level of nuisance that deprived the Baltimore’s residents of public rights.

One of the experts retained by the city, Brendan Saloner, a professor of American health in addiction at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, calculated that “83% of (opioid use disorder) cases in Baltimore in each year from 2010-2021 are attributable to the misuse of prescription opioids prior to any heroin use,” the city’s lawyers wrote in recent court papers.

The city also said it uncovered internal Johnson & Johnson documents that “acknowledge the link between prescription opioid use and subsequent illicit opioid use.”

“Abusers of [Janssen’s] reservoir patch who experiment and in many cases overdose, sometimes die’ and that ‘in the future’ as the Duragesic market grows, Duragesic ‘might not be safe,’” attorneys for the city wrote of one such document.

On Monday, members of a panel of perspective jurors gathered in a courtroom in Baltimore Circuit Court for jury selection in the Baltimore’s remaining case against opioid distributors McKesson and AmerisourceBergen. Comprised of about 100 people, the panel filled out questionnaires before being called one at a time to a private room for questions by Circuit Judge Lawrence P. Fletcher-Hill and attorneys in the case.

The questionnaire asked perspective jurors whether they or someone close to them “have training in the field of substance use disorder or addiction treatment,” if they or someone close to them worked in the pharmaceutical industry and if they or someone close to them had experienced a drug overdose.

The questionnaire included a list of potential witnesses. Among the more than 100 names were former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Police Commissioner Richard Worley and former commissioner Anthony Batts, as well as former Baltimore Health Commissioners Dr. Leana Wen and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein.

Fletcher-Hill said he believed he and the attorneys were “making good progress” in the “long process” of jury selection, ordering, “unfortunately,” that some of the prospective jurors return Tuesday.

“The good news,” Fletcher-Hill said Monday, “is I think we will be able to pick a jury tomorrow.”